Dropping Ideas

Is it possible to hit that infamous writer's block with a mere friendly phone call requesting you to write on anything you want? Anything at all. Technically given at least two decades of conscious, registered experiences, with equal parts of extensive travel, diversity, losses and miracles... 500-800 words and a week before you are to meet your 'deadline' on that anything I want to write about, should be easy ? Considering it is the end of the 7th day. I am only on my 5th line, with no particular direction in which to channel myself, one cup of coffee down in a cafe I haven't been in before, in Pune, wondering how the hell do people do this??? And exactly how to count 500-800 hundred words? (Secretly happy, I've hit at least a hundred by now!!)

The last two years alone have taken me to places, the names of which -- let alone having heard of -- I couldn't even pronounce. An early thought while struggling with my 'thinker's-block' , was to write about all the quaint, faraway, almost mythical towns, I like to say, I met. But how do you condense the fragrance of a sunset you saw while on a tram moving away from an faded, ornate yet charming clock tower in Bern, Switzerland, where a certain Albert apparently first thought of the theory of relativity. How do you recreate the scent of lavender in a city called Dubrovnik in Croatia, where a much older friend wants his ashes to be immersed as a tribute to his love for the azure Adriatic Sea that kisses that land and a lover long gone whom he met there and can't forget being kissed by. How do I write, in counted words about how warm and close to God, if there is such a being somewhere, it felt to look at the city of Lyon in France from a church upon a mountain while it snowed so gently as if to dress a freshly baked cake.

With cities and times that inspired another Albert's lifetime, while he wrote away his existential blues sparking generations to date with fire and unrest in the shroud of quiet humour, how can I possibly attempt ziplocking all that my restless, resistant to even blinking eyes have seen? So I dropped that idea, or so I think.

My next thought-stop was animals. Of the wild kind. A love affair that began in flesh and blood, no pun intended, in a Van Gogh dreamlike lemon-yellow and purple-hued, Maasai Mara in Kenya, almost a decade ago and has me married to it, until death do us apart. Like many yet not enough two legged creatures, I too am a student of the school which believes, that the better part of the world belongs to those on fours. This was a very tricky one for there isn't a language yet, known to me, to describe the skipped beats of my heart as I witnessed, within five feet the birth of a giraffe from his six-foot mother licking and kicking him to life as it dropped, thud and all, wide eyed but unable to see. Or the time I was hypnotised into spell by a fully grown male tiger in Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh, how I feel like I've never actually woken up and am dreaming ever since. I dropped that idea as well.

Maybe I really am dreaming everything up. There has been so much magic and so much unfathomable mystery in the little and the bigger things around me...that to have to write about anything suddenly brings back all that somewhere still holds me stunned. I wonder if I will be any better at this in some time from now. If the beauty of not knowing will still be around.